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Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook: Last Chance to Analyze Your Friend Network

Wolfram|Alpha’s Facebook analytics ranks high among our all-time most popular features. By now, millions of people have used Wolfram|Alpha to analyze their own activity and generate detailed analyses of their Facebook friend networks. A few years ago, we took data generously contributed by thousands of “data donors” and used the Wolfram Language’s powerful tools for social network analysis, machine learning, and data visualization to uncover fascinating insights into the demographics and interests of Facebook users.

At the end of this month, however, Facebook will be deprecating the API we relied on to extract much of this information.

Personal analytics for Facebook

You’ll still be able to generate an analysis of most of your own activity on Facebook, but you won’t have access to any information about your friends (except their names) unless they’ve also authorized our Facebook app. So in most cases, we won’t have enough data to generate a meaningful friend network graph, or to compute statistics about location, age, marital status, or other personal characteristics of your group of Facebook friends.

We completely support Facebook’s decision to increase the default security of users’ data, even though it will dramatically shorten reports for many people. So if you haven’t run your report in a while, or if you haven’t yet discovered what your report can tell you about yourself, we strongly suggest you ask Wolfram|Alpha to compute your Facebook personal analytics soon, while its full functionality is still available. And by all means, encourage friends and family who haven’t viewed their own Facebook analytics to do so—it’ll make everyone’s reports richer and more detailed.

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10 comments

  1. That’s a shame, the friend network graph was a really useful feature to get students engaged in an intro to graph theory.

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  2. That’s a real shame to hear. I think Facebook are really cracking down on these security loopholes – its just unfortunate that it has to be this way because the friend network graph was a really useful feature.

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  3. Has this already been discontinued? Once I grant WA access to my FB, it defaults to WA’s main page.

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  4. I take it this is also no longer working in Mathematica’s SocialMediaData command? A notebook in which I was showing off some Facebook network analysis stopped working between last week and today.

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  5. Another useful API is put to sleep. Very dissapointed facebook is deprecating the API. The tools on wolfram really brought the social accounts to life.

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  6. Data analytic is very critical these days, we can find out customer behavior on our website, we then can decide action based on that. Facebook don’t want their data to be exploited other by themselves.

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  7. Facebook is closing much in itself, which is a shame

    Reply